Like Water

by Rebecca Podos

  “Leigh!” I yell stupidly, frozen on the bed.

  She doesn’t look back at me when she hisses, “Go suck some huevos locos, you fucking baby dyke.” Then she swipes a knuckle below her eyes and strides out the door, leaving me in the ruins of our hideous room.

  What can I do but get up and keep moving?

  I kneel, picking through the wreckage for the biggest pieces of plastic and glass and broken costume jewelry. The rest I sweep free from the cracks in the floor with the broom from the kitchen, then pound the bristles out off the back porch.

  I find rags in the garage and wet them in the sink, scrubbing glitter and perfume from the floorboards until the cloth sparkles and stinks as badly as I do.

  I pile what’s left of Chris’s sister’s childhood treasures on top of the little desk in approximately the arrangement I remember, and survey the room. If I let dust collect on the furniture and on the floor for the rest of his vacation, leave the window open to air the smell until the last minute, it’ll be hard for Chris to tell we were ever here.

  The stars have faded and the sun is a bright yellow yolk on the horizon by the time I leave; a sky I recognize as six o’clock–ish. Only when I see the empty driveway do I remember that Leigh was my ride. I don’t think she meant to strand me two miles outside the center of La Trampa and three from home . . . but I feel like a scraped-clean seashell, like there’s air whistling through the cool, hard chambers of my chest, when I stop and think of what Leigh meant or didn’t mean. When I think of Leigh at all. When I stop moving at all.

  So instead, I walk.

  It’s still too early for cars this far from the town center—nobody who beats the sun to work comes out this way, and for sure no tourists are wandering off the Trail into La Trampa at this hour. The only sounds are the warble of birds, the nasal song of insects, and the slap-suck-slap-suck of my flip-flops on the pavement. I count steps by the pounding in my ankles as I make my way up Jimeno, along Calle De Vida that runs a mile into town and spits out on Calle Tamara a little way from the restaurant. Across the street from the tiny plaza: a patch of dust caught in the webbing of the main roads, where the tarnished bronze trapper and his gun glint dully in the new sun. Sitting on the wrought-iron bench at the base of the statue, canes beside them, Mr. Paiz and Mr. Armijo wait for Batista’s Café to open. Before we cut our hours they’d wait for Silvia’s. Now they get their horchatas elsewhere. Still, they wait exactly as they used to, same time, same place.

  Mr. Armijo raises a thick, hairy arm when he sees me, then leans in to whisper to Mr. Paiz. Who can blame him? Savannah Espinoza, wandering the streets at dawn. I know what I look like—a sea hag caught in a craft store explosion.

  I know before I climb the fire escape that winds up the two-story brick wall of the Turquoise Depot on Guadalupe; before I knock at the dented blue door of the little apartment on the second floor; before Jake answers, bare chested in worn plaid boxers, stubbled and shocked to see the Creature from the Lost Lagoon in all her morning glory. Knotty brown hair matted to my neck with sweat in the rising heat. Glittering up to my elbows and down my legs where I knelt to scrub the floor. Teary and red-eyed, and the smell—I stink like I’ve been rolling in obsolete perfume, which I practically have.

  “¿Qué chingados?” His voice is just-woke-up rusty. “¿Qué pasó, princesita?”

  “Nothing happened,” I croak. “Can I just—can I come in please?”

  He shifts and rubs one foot against the opposite leg. For a long second I think he’ll say no, and I don’t want to go home, haven’t even texted Mom like the thoughtful daughter I am, and I really don’t have a plan B except to keep on walking—

  “Fine,” he says. “But like . . . don’t sit on anything till I get a towel, okay?”

  I make myself as small as possible in his miniature living room while he digs around in his bedroom. I know his place pretty well. It’s not dirty, it never is, no dust or suspiciously crusty socks or dishes plastered with week-old eggs. But it is in a fixed state of disintegration. It never gets better, and it never gets worse. Like a condemned building just after the blast: the bomb’s gone off, but the bricks have yet to hit the ground. There’s the cheap TV stand bowed under the weight of a squat little set, the curtains as thin as fast-food napkins askew on their rungs, and the sagging, scratchy blue futon with one wooden arm pulled loose, clinging on by the screw tips. This futon, I know well. When Jake returns in a shirt and with a frayed red Coca-Cola beach towel, he spreads it gingerly on the cushions and gives the okay sign.

  “You should put newspaper down in case I’m not trained,” I say, but my heart’s not in it. I sink onto the towel, careful not to touch the back of the couch.

  He sits just as stiffly beside me, hands on his knees. “What happened to you?” he asks. Out of obligation, I think.

  “Nothing. I told you. I um, I don’t really want to talk.” I rub at grime and glitter stuck to my thumbnail. My hand shakes, but I haven’t slept in a while, so I forgive it.

  “So you’re here for what?”

  “No sé.” Though come on, I do know. I think that most of the time I have no idea, but at the moment, I really do. I just don’t like it, or myself, very much at all. I get stomped on by Leigh, then come crawling up Jake’s steps? What the fuck is wrong with me? And even now, even wondering this, I don’t stop. “I guess maybe I thought you’d, um . . .”

  “Oh.” He scratches at his pillow-crushed black hair. “I don’t think so, princesita.”

  “Oh,” I say, a dull echo of Jake.

  “You’re definitely hot, eso que ni qué.” He collapses back onto the cushions and throws one arm across the metal frame of the futon, easy swagger returned. He’s staring into the blank gray TV screen as if it’s playing a show that’s infinitely more interesting than me. “But I know you think you’re better than me.”

  “I don’t. I don’t think I’m better than anyone.”

  “Sure you do, like I’m some dumb townie.”

  “That’s stupid. I’m a townie, right? It’s my home too.” The word home tastes like the time Dad made his traditional ensalada agridulce de jamón ibérico, but in an unprecedented and (back then) mysterious error, forgot to put in the honey. All of the sour without the sweet.

  “So how come every time I ask you, you act like being my girl is the worst thing that could ever happen to you?”

  “How many girls do you need?” I snap.

  Jake kicks at the plastic leg of the TV stand in easy reach, and all the muscles in my throat clench tight, but he only taps it gently with his toe. “What if I said I just wanted you?”

  I look down, because I don’t want Jake. I want Leigh.

  But Leigh doesn’t want me anymore.

  And I don’t want to be all alone again in my own little trap.

  Besides, Jake’s right, in a way. He’s definitely not the very worst thing.

  I’ve never been in Jake Mosqueda’s bedroom before, never slid between his papery striped sheets or mashed my face into his Jake-smelling pillows, like cigarettes and bread and some Family Dollar knock-off of Old Spice. We don’t do anything more than curl up together, my back pressed to his overwarm chest, his arm an overwarm belt around my waist, big hand planted on the other side. He mumbles something softly into my shoulder and then lets me sleep awhile without even insisting I hose down first.

  It’s the sweetest thing he’s ever done.

  It’s also the first time I’ve ever believed what Nicole Mendez once tweeted about me (without naming me, because she is Nice): Some girls hate girls who go after their boyfriends, but I feel sorry for them because someday they’ll figure out how nasty and sad they are.

  EIGHTEEN

  It turns out, I can survive being with Jake.

  I can survive losing my job at the Lagoon, and the drought of texts from Iris and Kristian and the Camilas that follows the tidal wave of OMG, Vanni, I’m so sorry! That sucks so hard! We’ll still han
g out all the time, right?

  I can survive riding the bus or the borrowed Malibu or Jake’s rust-bucket truck back and forth from Silvia’s to home, where Mom is so desperately cheerful, she wears her Riveting Rose lipstick just to watch TV, or to wash and re-bandage the stitches that cross my father’s brown forearm like tiny black railroad tracks.

  Sure, the morning after Leigh, I woke up in Jake’s bed with just this collapsed star pulsating inside my rib cage, and it hasn’t stilled since. I called her once. I texted her twice. I drove halfway to her house six times before turning around again.

  But I can survive without Leigh, too. Because the best thing about surviving is that it requires no extra-special effort to just keep doing it; no big decisions or choices of any kind are required. “Just keep doing it” is, like, the definition of survival, right? I mean, when I stop and look at Dad, or at the test application and consent forms bookmarked on my phone and laptop, I know that isn’t literally true . . . but if I don’t stop and look, I can keep believing.

  So I don’t stop.

  And I don’t look.

  The Friday almost three weeks after Leigh, my last paycheck arrives in the mail from the Lagoon—when Eric said I couldn’t come back, I guess he meant on the property, like, at all—and after feeding it into my meager bank account, I check Craigslist for job listings. The Mine Shaft Tavern in Madrid is hiring waitstaff, though the hours conflict with Silvia’s. So is a car wash in La Cienega, the ad posted only this morning.

  Xime’s taking Dad to PT, and Jake’s job at the Trading Post doesn’t start till four, so he drives me out to Nick’s Cars ’n’ Kitsch to drop off my résumé and the printed-out application. He parks by the main office and pushes his aviators up into his stupidly beautiful black hair for a better look. “Well, this is—” He breaks off, snickering. The dust out front of the concrete wash bays is staked with every tacky statue under the sun: pink lawn flamingos, big plaster dinosaurs, windmill sculptures made from Coke cans, a chipped life-size mannequin of Marilyn Monroe. Of course the theme of a car wash along the Turquoise Trail couldn’t be, I don’t know, washing cars. “At least it’s not one of those sexy places where you sponge off windshields with your boobs.”

  Right. I’d totally keep my dignity intact as I hosed down trucks surrounded by garden gnomes and a giant plastic doughnut wearing a sprinkle-topped sombrero.

  But when I talk to Carl, the thirtysomething assistant manager with an unambitious hairline, he tells me that the hiree will work indoors only; they’ve already got a carefully cultivated team of high school boys to man the bays for minimum wage and tips.

  “You’d stay behind the register. You got customer service experience?” Carl asks, though he has my résumé in hand. It’s a quick enough read. I used phrases like “maintained high standards of service during high-volume hours” and “collaborated well with coworkers,” because that’s what you’re supposed to say instead of “served, like, two customers per hour and occasionally gave my appreciative coworker a handy while on break.” I left the Lost Lagoon off the sheet completely. I don’t think Eric could give me a glowing recommendation even if he wanted to, and I’m not convinced that a month and a half of mermaidenhood qualifies me for employ at a car wash.

  Though the job is water adjacent.

  “Lots of customer service,” I sum up for Carl.

  “That’s good. We had two girls, and one of ’em left to have a baby, decided not to come back after. But it’s not a tough job. Mostly gets a little stiff sitting all day, but we’re working on getting a better chair.” Carl rolls his beat-up old office chair out from behind the desk to demonstrate, then rolls back again. “Can you do morning shifts?”

  “Pretty much every morning.”

  “Good, that’s good. Not planning on going off to school or moving any time soon? We need someone to stick around.”

  “Not going anywhere.” I show my teeth. “Do you think I’ll get an interview?”

  He narrows his eyes at me, as though I asked whether I should wear a ball gown or tuxedo to work. “Think you need one?”

  So that’s how I get my next part-time job, at Nick’s Cars ’n’ Kitsch.

  Jake insists we celebrate that evening when he gets off work at nine. There’s a nighttime party happening in the arroyo. Zero high school kids, just his cabrónes and their girlfriends, he says, reaching across the stick shift to squeeze my knee on that last word.

  There’s no good reason to say no.

  To get to the dry river ditch that runs behind Chris’s property, you either have to bike up Jimeno and walk your bicycle across the rough, or park your car along Calle De Vida and hike in. Jimeno’s so small and straggly that Sherriff Portola and his deputy, the only police presence in La Trampa, won’t notice a chain of beaters parked in the roadside weeds. I mean, they know that kids hang out there. Our parents did it in their day; Sherriff Portola probably did it. Sometimes he or the deputy come to chase kids out, scatter them into the brush like rabbits, but rarely. Nobody bothers to pick their way across the plains to bust us unless one of the homeowners nearby calls in a noise complaint. Just after the sun sets, Jake and I leave his truck in the Burrito Bandito lot and hike along the property line between Chris’s place and the Marcons’, far enough from either house not to be noticed, even if Chris were there. He reaches for my hand and I let him take it, though he feels too warm, his fingers too thick, like they’re forcing mine too far apart.

  Jake’s boys are already there when we ease down the dirt slope. “¿Dónde es la peda?” he laughs, and Marcus Barela, the clerk at the Allsup’s, fishes two bottles of Dos Equis out of a blue cooler and hands one to each of us. I wipe the damp from the ice off on the skirt of my dress, a swingy black slip thing with a crocheted back. I’m wearing it because I know Jake likes it. I know, because I wore it to the restaurant on Monday, and he tugged me toward the stockroom before he’d even clocked in. He would’ve lost fifteen minutes of pay, if my parents counted seconds and pennies. He did lose out on a six-top of tourists who left Estrella a decent tip.

  Gathered around the cooler in the glow of a Coleman lantern are a couple of guys who work at the Trading Post with Jake. The bag boy rocking an extreme black buzz cut and pressed polo shirt, I recognize as Adrian Trejo, Oriel’s big brother by a year or two. And the girl he’s got his arm around—

  “Hey, Vanni.” Diana Reyes waves, lips curling into a shy smile.

  Shocked, I raise my bottle so quickly the rim knocks me in the mouth. “Hey.” I run my tongue across my throbbing lip. “I didn’t know you were . . .”

  “Me and Adrian?” she asks, and I remember when we were freshmen and Adrian was the sophomore she called Band Boy; how she whispered into my ear at the spring concert that he played the clarinet like a lifeguard giving mouth-to-mouth. “We’re kind of new. Or not new. I guess it’s been six months?” She giggles and props her chin on his shoulder.

  He tips his head and kisses her cheek. “It was after we did that volunteer trip to that dog park in Albuquerque. North Domingo Baca, right? Di liked how I pulled the weeds.”

  “It was very sexy,” she confirms.

  I can’t imagine the Diana Reyes I grew up a mile apart from, whose quinceañera party favors included glittery plastic purity rings, saying “sex” in any form. Not aloud, and never to a boy. You know, she always called it, as in: “Marilee told me Sonja Vee and Matt Wiley went to see Jurassic World and in the back row, they, you know?” Inspecting her in the lantern’s wavering white-blue light, I notice her hair’s escaped the frizzy clump of her traditional low bun to fluff around her shoulders, which seem . . . Diana’s always had the spinal posture of a Cheeto, but outside the halls of the high school and off her parents’ property line, outside of my and Marilee’s shadow, she’s straighter and taller.

  “You look really . . .” Happy. Possibly but possibly not still a virgin. No, probably still; unlike his brother, Adrian’s the kind of boy Diana’s parent
s are likely to approve of, if they’ll approve of a boy at all. The kind who’ll buy her the best Valentine’s Day bouquets in the cooler at Albertsons and never expect a “present” in return. Either way, it’s nobody’s business but hers. “. . . really good,” I finish the sentiment.

  “You too!” she says.

  This might be an outright lie, but it is pretty dark by now, and I’m standing just outside the globe of the lantern’s light.

  “You and Jake are dating?” she asks with a polite smile.

  “We’re new.”

  “I thought maybe you were dating Will Fischer.”

  I chug an unnecessary amount to buy myself time. “Nope. We never really went out. I was hanging out with someone else. But now we’re not.”

  Possibly, that’s all we were ever doing. Two weeks ago I would’ve said no, we were more, we were perfect. Still, she never bought me flowers, and I never took her home to meet Mom and Dad. Even Jake comes inside to say hello when he picks me up—Leigh never even made it to the doorbell. When we fought, she told me that I didn’t love her, didn’t even know her, but I know this: If a week from now on the morning of her eighteenth birthday, Leigh called me to say “Never mind, Vanni, I’m ditching my crazy-stupid plan and sticking around for you,” I would drop Jake flat. Or shit, if she called to say, “Hey, I don’t forgive you or love you or want you, but can you stop by my house on the way to the car wash and bring me a pizza anyway?” I’d drop him flat. I know not-so-deep-down that I’m only here because Leigh won’t call, she won’t change her mind, she won’t want me back. That doesn’t make what I’m doing to Jake right, or make me any less of a shitty person. The fact is, I’d probably drop anybody, everybody. If that isn’t love, what is?